ABSTRACT
Coming to Grips with India’s Past and her ‘Living Present’: John Marshall’s Early Years (1902-06) Part II
Nayanjot Lahiri
This constitutes the concluding part of a paper, the first part of which was published in South Asian Studies 14 (1998), on John Marshall’s early years. Marshall trained in Classical archaeology but spent most of his working life overseeing and shaping archaeology in colonial India. His archaeological career in the subcontinent began in 1902 when, as a young man of 25, he was appointed as ‘Director-General of Archaeology in India’.
The formative phase of Marshall’s career (1902-06) broadly coincided with the Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon (1899-1905) who played a decisive role in grooming him. Discharging Curzon’s ambitious programme of conservation, in fact, provides the frame for contextualizing Marshall’s early archaeological work. The first part of this paper was primarily concerned with that aspect of his apprenticeship.
But the story of Marshall’s early years does not end with these monument-repairing activities. Whenever conservation work allowed him the leisure, as Part II of the paper demonstrates, he moved across the terrain, taking in sites from Charsada to Rajagriha, animatedly formulating the implications of new discoveries for the edifice of the Indian past as it then existed. This, moreover, had to be more appropriately documented and presented, both in museums and through publications and a great deal of Marshall’s time and correspondence is concerned with ways of achieving this end. The Indian past was also part of the living present of its inhabitants and impinged on the Survey’s activities in various ways. This paper tries to understand that world of contestation and interaction as well.
Finally, archaeological work within a colonial context, embodied a variety of interpersonal relations. For the man who is the subject of this essay, were human beings essentially the same or different? Marshall’s letters and communications are cluttered with references to the differences among Britishers, European ‘foreigners’ and Indians, and such perceptions, in some ways, influenced the character of the Archaeological Department that he headed. This too, forms an integral part of the story of his teething years